I Don’t Even…

I’m not sure if the universe is trolling me with this, but take a look at these screenshots.

The anime this is from?

Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman.

Yes, you read the title right.

Mari is a Christian who is about to attend the Perfect Religion Academy, a place where the religious members of tomorrow are trained. She befriends Saori, a Hindu girl who becomes her roomate. Unfortunately she gets kidnapped by the evil Black Buddha cult, and there’s only one way she can get her back.

As she prays for help, none other than Buddha appears. He gives her a sacred sumo belt that turns her into said Gautaman. Now she has to use her butt to defeat the evil Black Buddha cult, the members of which include an evil newspaper deliveryman, a sumo wrestler wearing a Darth Vader mask, six very ugly freshmen, a panty-exposing samurai, and more. I am not kidding about this. I really am not kidding.

She blocks and breaks a sword in her buttcrack.

The anime is horrible. It’s ridiculously perverted, doesn’t have an ending, is utterly bizarre, and is held as one of the worst anime of all time. It came up on a bad anime thread, and I checked it out on a whim. Even at 45 minutes, it’s too long. But for a few moments, we had a real Christian protagonist, one who said what she did in the screenshots above.

It’s like for a few seconds, I had a glimpse of what a Christian anime could have been like.

It made me a little sad. We’re so isolated as Christians. So few people write for us. It’s like whole aspects of our existence never get talked about. I had a vision of a 45 minute OVA, done in the 80s, where the Christian heroine becomes a real magical girl. Not in a perverted sense as a soldier of Buddha, but one that kept along with the spirit of those few moments. Just one OVA. We don’t even have that.

Sigh.

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12 Comments on “I Don’t Even…”

If that glimpse you mentioned is any indication of what Christian anime would be like, then I’m not exactly optimistic, even if the show didn’t devolve into fighting evil with one’s buttocks. Mari was a bland, undeveloped character who was milquetoast outside of hind end-related heroism.

Also, this whole “I’m so lonely” stuff has got to stop if you want to see results – it won’t change anything other than attracting pity and con artistry, both of which feed off of desperation and a lack of individual pride. I have heard a lot of complaining from you on this blog and no serviceable solutions to your problems other than semi-abstract descriptions of yourself and your ideals whose meaning only you fully understand. Even if you do feel lonely or isolated, you have to be willing to stomach it for awhile and start actively working on actually building something you believe is better as opposed to merely theorizing what that something should be.

Yes, it’s a bad anime. All of the scenes above happen in the space of two minutes. It’s a 45 minute OVA done in the 80s, and 90% of them were crap anyways. I still have Baoh and Windaria flashbacks. It’s more that it gave a brief glimpse of something that you simply cant find, and the irony is that you only saw it in one of the worst anime ever.

As for results, look, this isn’t losing weight or finding a new job. There are some things that a single person can work to build on themselves, and there are things where there are structural issues that tend to work against people achieving their goals. For creative culture, its the fact that the game is skewed towards capital; a lot of the bad things happen because the people bankrolling things have a massively disproportionate amount of power to set trends and exclude others. The only way to change this it seems is to get a ton of capital yourself and spend money to change the parameters of the conversation. For Christian culture specifically, this has reached absurd levels where ENTIRE GENRES are ignored by the mainstream publishing industry. We’re in the middle of a geek renaissance, and the Christian market is publishing Amish Romance and movies about relationships.

You can write all the indie books you like; I have a kindle full of them. But lasting change is a lot harder to work for than people think, and requires a level of power that many of us don’t have. Something like this really deserves a post of its own, though.

No matter how much the creative industry may be geared towards profit, playing victim is not going to change that. Do you honestly think your only option at this stage in the game is to curl into a ball and complain on the internet? Even if you cannot influence the greater literary culture in the long run (or whatever culture you wish to reach, for that matter), isn’t it better to face defeat with the dignified knowledge that you tried in the first place?

Just try to start something – the process of change may be more nuanced than simply having an idea and realizing it, but it is easier to pitch ideas than ever before. We live in the age of Kickstarter and Patreon. People are not relegated to the same barriers that impeded creation of commercial products before since 1) they can now pitch an idea to a massive audience with relative ease and 2) quickly gather the necessary money needed for the creation of a product.

Do not underestimate the power mass media can afford you. Consider, for example, the success of Frictional Games, the indie game company behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the Penumbra trilogy. Those games were not financial smash hits compared to triple-A game titles such as the Call of Duty series (at least not to my knowledge), but it gained massive popularity and left an impact on the gaming community. Hell, indie games in general are basking in success while many big-name companies such as Capcom and EA – people who, by your logic, are supposedly the ones who dictate the culture as the little guys sputter and are crushed by them – slowly but surely crash in the face of financial/legal woes and dwindling fan support. Small publishers, whether they are dominating the market financially or not, are in the midst of unprecedented influence and support from both indie and mainstream gaming outlets.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you are not entitled to success. As long as there is a free marketplace of ideas, some ideas will fail to gain traction. The idea is to retool them; the most successful people of any era kept retooling their ideas until they found the right niche. Your ideas failing to catch on is not inherently a conspiracy to silence you and like-minded people (unless, of course, you present your ideas in a country where expression is regulated to death such as China or Russia). Such a conspiratorial mindset towards failure will only beget further failure.

In short, action – with any degree of success – is more dignified and rewarding than defeatism.

I agree, I wish we would see more anime’s that had images like the ones you saw, but at the same time we need to be the ones pushing to create these anime’s as well. Or at least complaining to the companies that do make them to include more Christian based values or characters in the anime’s as well. Just like your comment above, who honestly reads Amish love stories?! I’ve seen those books too :(

The best anime that I’ve seen reflecting a Christian anime was the one about all the stories of the bible, I forget what it was called…the first episode was the creation of the world, then they had one on Moses, Jesus, etc. VERY old, but good stuff though!

In all honesty, I would love to see anime’s that at least have Kingdom values in them, and the supernatural is shown off in a positive way, or maybe the character trusting in God to provide for them and not being ashamed of who they are as Christians. It’s just a reflection of the way the Japanese see Christianity or any religion, it’s just another way to fill story lines.

Great reply by HolographicAnimeverse, I do agree creating change is the way to go in this era. If someone were to just CREATE a great Christian based anime, or at least one with similar values, I would definitely throw money down to make it happen. I just finished using Kickstarter some months ago to help produce a documentary on the supernatural and Holy Spirit miracles called “Holy Spirit” by Darren Wilson and it received WAYYY more money than it was going for (over $300,000!) It has been made and it will transform hundreds of thousands and millions of lives. So yeah, let’s find someone who is doing that and back them! :)

You need to watch Blassreiter. That anime screams Catholicism. After all, it’s main character is named Joseph, his mentor was a Catholic priest, it seems to connect the characters’ suffering to the Crucifixion, and references the Book of Revelations. It’s a great and often overlooked anime.

I will agree that the first few episodes are not that great. But the story improves a great deal later on. In particular, the show stops focusing on motorcycle racing, which perhaps the worst part about the beginning: one doesn’t want to watch motorcycle races, one wants a story!

Well, they have two Miss Fanservices essentially. But the good one usually only shows the top and center of her bosom–which she conceals during fights–while the bad one shows some leg in addition. There is one very short sex scene at the beginning of one episode–not very graphic and one can just skip to the intro song–and a woman who wears a nightgown in one scene. That’s about it. One really doesn’t think that it’s fanservice-y when watching it; though Amanda Werner is gorgeous.

Anyway, I suppose that most of my recommendations contain fanservice, unless I’m recommending a work by Hayao Miyazaki, Trigun, Rurouni Kenshin and the like. It’s so hard to avoid!

[…] D.M. Dutcher laments the lack of entertainment written for Christians, though he saw a glimpse of what might have been in a few scenes of Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman. That was before it all went downhill. Here’s his description of that OVA’s plot [Cacao, put down the shovel!]: […]